Wednesday, January 30, 2008

As well as closing about forty issues, the release includes the following notes:

We have just released IronPython 2.0 Alpha 8. Aside from the usual bugs fixes this release includes a fairly major change. This is the first release of IronPython where the Visual Studio solution file, IronPython.sln, is in Visual Studio 2008 (VS2008) format. This file is in fact incompatible with Visual Studio 2005 (VS2005) and the msbuild executable distributed with the .NET 2.0 SDK. If you currently build IronPython from VS2005 or the .NET 2.0 SDK this change will affect you and you have at least a couple of available options:

Upgrade to .NET 3.5 or VS2008. It’s important to point out that internally we pass the “/toolsversion:2.0” flag to msbuild when building from a command prompt. This isn’t mandatory though and the reason we use it is to ensure IronPython continues to run under .NET 2.0.

Continue to build IronPython under VS2005 or the .NET 2.0 SDK using IronPython2005.sln. IronPython2005.sln is the VS2005 version of IronPython.sln and exists alongside IronPython.sln in the source distribution zip file. We do not recommend this however as IronPython2005.sln is deprecated and we don’t plan on updating it

Another notable change is that all built-in Exception classes are now new-style classes. This improves our CPython 2.5 compatibility and we’re now able to run quite a few more CPython 2.5 tests successfully. On that note, a lot of effort has gone into making IronPython pass more of CPython’s 2.5 tests.